The U.S. death rate has dropped to prepandemic levels as COVID-19 fell out of the top 10 leading causes of death, according to research published Wednesday.
The death rate fell by 3.8 percent in 2024, with the overall rate declining from 750.5 per 100,000 people in 2023 to 722 per 100,000 last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported.
This is the lowest the country’s death rate has been since 2019, when the CDC reported a national death rate of 715.2 deaths per 100,000 people. That rate shot up by 16.8 percent in 2020 to 835.4 deaths per 100,000.
That same year, COVID was ranked as the third-leading cause of death in the country.
Fewer COVID-19 deaths are likely driving the decline in the nation’s overall death rate, Farida Ahmad, health scientist at NCHS and corresponding author of the report, told ABC News.
“Ever since it came onto the scene in 2020, COVID was one of the top 10 leading causes of death,” she told the outlet. “It started off as a third-leading cause and, in 2024, we see that it’s not ranked at all, actually. So, it’s still among the 15 leading causes, but not in the top 10.”
The top three leading causes of death in the U.S. in 2024 were the same as the year before: heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injury.
Suicide replaced COVID-19 as the 10th leading cause of death in the country, with more than 48,000 people dying of it last year, according to the report.
The suicide rate steadily rose between 2000 and 2018, increasing by 37 percent over that time, according to CDC data.
The rate dipped slightly between 2018 and 2020 before returning to a peak rate of 14.2 suicide deaths per 100,000 people in 2022.
